gyppos
This past week South End Hardwoods padlocked its gate, boarded up its windows, handed out the pink slips and closed down once and for all. Nobody but the couple of stoned part-timers on the greenchain were surprised, but the axe had been ready to fall for more than a few months. The yard was pretty near cleared and the skidders looked small and rusty standing idle against the chain link fence with no trucks rolling in every half hour with their increasingly skinny loads of sorry pecker poles.
The hey days of old growth nettles are long gone, now just black and white memories on the Mabana Logging Museum’s walls, photos of the now unemployed’s fathers and grandfathers atop logs scarcely imaginable today, once dragged out of the forest primeval by oxen and horse, gone to chip and bark and ash, gone forever. A couple of the boys not near enough to retirement to cash it in but too old to sign on for re-training for jobs requiring computer competency, drowned their sorrows at the Hotel Bar and kicked around running a gyppo operation, run the logs they could scrounge down to Everett maybe. But woods work is a young man’s game and if felling trees didn’t kill them outright, a heart attack probably would. Better to idle away a few hours and too many beers and crazy talk than face the music coming when their wives got the news of their layoffs. Maybe they should’ve gotten out when the getting was good, not waited til the ship was listing and half under water, headed straight for Davy Jones’ locker. But between them they had 60 years at South End Hardwoods and not much desire to start swimming toward a receding shoreline.
Truth is, it was all they knew, those jobs at the mill. By midnight they’d close the bar down, shake calloused hands, tell each other things would work out. It would be a long ride home, past the new stores, the gated communities, the golf course, the fire stations, past the forgotten forests they’d helped clear, past the dreams and their hopes, past even their own future looking for all the world like ghosts on stumps receding in the rear view.
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